Visual News: Benchmark and Challenges in News Image Captioning

Fuxiao Liu, Yinghan Wang, Tianlu Wang, Vicente Ordonez


Abstract
We propose Visual News Captioner, an entity-aware model for the task of news image captioning. We also introduce Visual News, a large-scale benchmark consisting of more than one million news images along with associated news articles, image captions, author information, and other metadata. Unlike the standard image captioning task, news images depict situations where people, locations, and events are of paramount importance. Our proposed method can effectively combine visual and textual features to generate captions with richer information such as events and entities. More specifically, built upon the Transformer architecture, our model is further equipped with novel multi-modal feature fusion techniques and attention mechanisms, which are designed to generate named entities more accurately. Our method utilizes much fewer parameters while achieving slightly better prediction results than competing methods. Our larger and more diverse Visual News dataset further highlights the remaining challenges in captioning news images.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.542
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6761–6771
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.542
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.542
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fuxiao Liu, Yinghan Wang, Tianlu Wang, and Vicente Ordonez. 2021. Visual News: Benchmark and Challenges in News Image Captioning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6761–6771, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visual News: Benchmark and Challenges in News Image Captioning (Liu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.542.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.542.mp4
Code
 FuxiaoLiu/VisualNews-Repository